


Justified True Belief

by horrvi, pikalex88



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Art as legacy, But also existential optimism, Character Study, Existential Angst, Gen, Spoilers for the end of the church questline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:28:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24426520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horrvi/pseuds/horrvi, https://archiveofourown.org/users/pikalex88/pseuds/pikalex88
Summary: In a forgotten church, on a desolate coast, in an orphaned city, enters a woman. She walks with purpose, slowly and methodically, over the creaking wooden floors. Eyes casting around, looking for… something, even she is not sure what. Patterns. Data. And their inverse; Pattern breaks. Outliers. Things which do not belong.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19
Collections: Disco Elysium Big Bang





	Justified True Belief

**Author's Note:**

> My partner on this fic was enzerr (@enzerris on Twitter), who provided fantastic ideas and beautiful art, thank you partner!

In a forgotten church, on a desolate coast, in an orphaned city, enters a woman. She walks with purpose, slowly and methodically, over the creaking wooden floors. Eyes casting around, looking for… something, even she is not sure what. Patterns. Data. And their inverse; Pattern breaks. Outliers. Things which do not belong. Unseen, a curious shadow moves high above in the rafters, observing the well-ordered path this guest weaves through the echoing space.

She is not unsettled by the oppressive atmosphere of this abandoned place of worship. It doesn’t occur to her that she should be.

She does not give the shattered chest of the most merciful of Innocence anything more than a glancing look. It stirs no feeling, in her heart or her lungs.

She comes here determined and resolute. Not hopeful - it has been too long a journey for that - but with a certainty that whatever may be hidden, she can bring to light.

But in a single step, one which should be no different than the last dozen, the woman crosses a threshold unseen.

As she stops, her brain registering a change in stimuli but not having sifted through the information enough to achieve categorization, she feels confusion - an uncomfortable emotion.

As her mind catches up and supplies her with the fact that this last footstep has made no audible sound at all, she feels uneasy - her miniscule presence as a living thing in this vast dead space suddenly a contrast of which she is acutely aware.

As she realizes that she cannot in fact hear a single thing - the murmur of rain upon the rooftop, the drip of water slowly leaking in, not even the sound of her own breathing, she feels  _ afraid  _ \- a primal voice so deep down she had forgotten it’s exist telling her  _ run, leave this place, ask no questions and seek no truth, you may attempt to force order upon your world but some things are too vast, to invite them into your mind is to let them swallow you whole. _

And yet finally, as she gathers the nerve to form a hypothesis and an experimental method to match, drawing in a deep breath and then releasing it in a sung note of no particular pitch - but which in fact produces no sound at all, contrary to all known laws of physics… what she decides lays before her is a  _ challenge. _

  


Soona Luukanen-Kilde has, in her sixteen years of experience, programmed in many different conditions. Crammed into a closet with so many whirring radiocomputers that when she left for the day the silence felt deafening. In an office that failed to pay the heating bill, cutting the fingers off her only pair of gloves so that she has the mobility to type while slowly losing feeling in her hands. Faulty equipment, ancient equipment, equipment that would shock you if you touched it the wrong way, equipment that would hard crash and wipe your day’s work if you jostled it even slightly. Working with madcap dreamers who asked her for the impossible, and condescending bigots who asked her for nothing at all. She has weathered all of it with professionalism, and with an unwavering certainty that she is here to do her job and do it well, and nothing is going to stop her.

When her own dreams were crushed, her team turned against her and scattered to the wind, she set out to investigate the cause with that same level of determination. That no one else believed there was something to be found didn’t matter, and neither did the fact she had little to no information to go on. She was used to overcoming the odds. Her world revolved around taking the barest forms of truth - numbers and digits representing pure mathematical and computational concepts - and layering these little pieces to bend reality to her will. At the start, an empty filament, transmitters and receivers barely more than scrap. At the end, a solution to a problem, a device that was alive and thrumming with purpose. Her mind made this so and had never failed to solve a problem - and so why would it fail her now?

This certainty never faltered, for years.

But here, in this church, with its dark rising beams of rotting wood and its shards of broken iconographic glass - here, she has felt a quaver in that confidence. At first like a ripple, a drop of fear passing through the mind and causing mild displacement where it goes, but soon restored to equilibrium. However, this is not a ripple in an open ocean, but in a contained vessel. This place was built as a sanctuary where believers could step through the threshold and leave the dismal reality of the world behind, and somehow even desecrated as it may be, it maintains that separation of space. Within a constrained volume of liquid, a ripple is unable to dissipate, and instead must reflect. Upon reflecting, waves overlap, an interference pattern of construction and deconstruction. Chaos and turbulence, that one source of little ripples enough to disrupt an entire surface. She has only been here for a few weeks, but already the knowledge she has gained has been that source of mental displacement that has grown and grown until she’s not sure she’s certain of anything anymore - not just regarding her project, but regarding reality.

Because if her understanding of the data is right (and it almost always is) - she is currently clicking away at her keyboard only some dozen meters away from the void.

Even the name troubles her. Nature abhors a vacuum after all, and this anomaly defies logic. To call it a void when it can be no such thing feels like an admission of ignorance. Opening up her log file for the first time in several days, her hands hesitate over the keys. “I’ve named it *the swallow*” she types, feeling a modicum of control return in the act of naming. A designation: orderly, congruent.

That night she sits sipping lukewarm coffee from a thermos, radiocomputer spun down, lit only by what moonlight creeps in through collapsed roofing. Staring at a point high up in the dark, the swallow, located and named but yet unseen. A quote comes to mind unbidden, something from long ago, reading discourses in Koenigstein. “If you name me, you negate me. By giving me a name, a label, you negate all the other things I could possibly be.” 

In code, it’s simple. A double negation is simply a repeated operation nulling itself out, a bit flipped and flipped back again. But how would one negate a negation in the physical world? She considers this until the coffee is gone and her limbs feel stiff in the cold, snowflakes carried in on the night breeze settling softly on her hair. When she is eventually forced to relocate somewhere warmer, fingers too frozen to operate the keys, she sleeps but she does not rest.

The hardest days are those few in between discovering this anomaly and quantifying its existence. It is a terrible thing sometimes, to be hopeful. It means placing a bet on the future and having to justify that bet. The more wild the bet, the more serious the need for justification. Data loss via previously undiscovered audio-spatial disturbance and not user negligence is the kind of claim that demands nothing less than pure, irrefutable data. But data can’t be spun from the ether, it needs equipment, mics she doesn’t have, drivers and adaptors and interpreters that are all within her reach but take time. Time in which she reads her own journal entries and wonders if this is the point where she’s finally gone mad - not an upsetting thought, just an observation. She has, after all, spent a great deal of time dwelling in the basement of a complex commonly called the Doomed Commercial Area, curled up next to an ice box in the shape of a bear. Not exactly an environment that suggests a sound mind, and relocating to an abandoned and violated Dolorian church doesn’t speak to a return to sanity. She’s at peace with the archetype she inhabits, not ignorant of it, and has spent enough time with writers to recognize that the arc for someone like her is doomed to end in madness sooner or later.

The only part of this that truly troubles her is the idea that she’ll go mad too soon and won’t be able to compile her findings in a legible way. If she can just ensure the truth is found and shared, whatever happens after is an acceptable cost. A quiet voice that sounds like her mother whispers -  _ this statement itself is indicative of a kind of madness my dear.  _ But she ignores it, with practiced ease.

When the doubt becomes overwhelming, she returns to that spot in the church and stands in the silence, humming a tune that no one at all can hear.

In her dreams, she often returns to that spot but the strange stillness is gone, her humming and then shouting echoing loud and harsh. Another unanswerable question bogging her down, the unbearable burden of proof crushing her until she collapses and listens to her own pitiful sobs, horribly audible. 

But each morning, when she returns, it’s still there. Doubt dissipating into the silence.

Data finally cedes itself to her, on a day with a hint of spring in the air. She is jubilant and vindicated, reading and re-reading the print out in her hands demonstrating that she is correct and physics is wrong - a hole does indeed exist, a pillar of silence with a diameter of approximately three meters. Not enough to prove it’s related to the data loss, not yet, but it’s the best lead she’s had since the incident itself. She keeps her tone level in her logs, but inside, her blood is thrumming.

It’s only as the days pass and the finicky details of tweaking audio equipment and scouring numeric outputs for inconsistencies start to become routine, that her mind has room to start considering the ramifications of what she has proven. The fear comes back, bit by bit. 

Structure in logical thought relies on taking a set of stable building blocks (axioms) and deriving conclusion after conclusion, building a house of cards higher and higher. You can debate how to arrive at the conclusions and find novel ways to infer facets of reality through interpretation of your axioms, but those base assumptions stand firm. They have to. If you change an axiom then all facts derived from it become invalid, and every fact derived from  _ those _ facts, a cascading refutation that collapses an entire model of reality. 

What her data is pointing to is a breaking of axioms. Typical approaches and equipment can no longer be considered reliable, as they were built with assumptions running counter to what she’s aiming to examine. It’s the worst kind of project killer. She’s personally seen dreams die again and again from an urge to throw everything out and go back to bare metal basics - and she takes pride in her pragmatic approach that doesn’t shy away from building on what she has. But here, she can’t trust anything.

On the upside, this does mean she doesn’t need to hunt around for fancy recording equipment. A machine constructed by someone else is a black box of intent; its assumptions might seep into her findings, conceal the truth. As she pours sea water into ceramic bowls, Soona lets herself relish the simplicity. Waves and vibrations in a liquid medium. With so much of her time in the world of the digital and the invisible, there’s a satisfaction in seeing the physical results of her work, moving a bowl just so and seeing her readings narrow in just a bit closer. It’s oddly calming and brings back a sense memory from long long ago, in what feels like another world. She would bake bread, satisfied by the feeling of the dough in her hands and the sight of a beautifully risen loaf. Looking out at the shimmering surfaces of her many little makeshift sensors, she feels a similar sort of pride.

After so long making nonexistent or incremental progress, the sudden breakthrough dilates time strangely. Days fly by in endlessly fiddling with instrumentation and trying different ways of slicing the data to reveal some underlying structure. The real portent of change isn’t something she recognizes as such at the time - some speedfreaks set up a camp nearby, and their presence is like the buzzing of a fly. Distracting, annoying, but not notable. That they seem to have designs on the church isn’t even really a threat - she’s fought long and hard to get to this point and there’s no force that could stop her now. Some drugged up punks wouldn’t stand a chance. She  _ will  _ see this through.

Finally, like a catalyst igniting an exothermic reaction, the disco cop stumbles onto the scene and things move very, very quickly. That she could get  _ help _ is not an option she’d remotely considered, and yet it arrives in the form of two RCM officers and those young punks who turn out to be not quite as brainfried as she’d expected. The next few days are frantic, unexpected, and then… an answer.

It wasn’t the fault of any person. It wasn’t something that could have been avoided with more precautions, or better equipment. It had truly been eaten, swallowed up into the Pale. Relief and frustration, to have proven that they were all as innocent as they were powerless.

Yet as she begins to mentally compose the first of many letters to her scattered comrades, thinking through how to summarize her search and her findings into something that doesn’t sound like she’s lost her grip on reality - a fact surfaces in her mind, pieces silently clicking together.

If the detective is right, if this really is the Pale... Then the project, the data, the dream - it’s not really  _ gone _ . The Pale is not a void, it is a vast memory bank and while no one understands the mechanisms to reliably read and write to it, evidence suggests anything passing through snags somewhere inside.

In her younger days, she’d doubted this could really be true - that the Pale could hold all these memories of all these people passing through transiently or disappearing forever. The occasional journey between isolas didn’t change her mind either - yes, she experienced thoughts and feelings foreign to her, but there was no proof that they were memories and not more common hallucinations. All evidence seemed unsatisfactory, anecdotal. Until a party at Fortress Accident, celebrating the successful delivery of a milestone (a bit behind schedule, but not enough to be a red flag, not yet… that would come later.) They’d had a ‘biz dev’ expert, Soren, responsible for drumming up the funding to keep the project afloat, which necessitated networking at all the major events, and particularly frequent travel between the Igaunian investors in Graad and the team in Martinaise. More frequent than was technically recommended, from a Pale exposure standpoint. 

Everyone was merry and three sheets to the wind, Soren as much as anyone, and she’d listened as he chuckled his way through a story about staying in an atrocious hotel with all-night rock and roll in the lobby, which had finally driven him to get up and wander to a radiocomputer cafe in search of peace of mind. She wasn’t the only one to get a bit quiet and still as he continued obliviously, holding his sides and slapping his knee in delight to talk about the Mirovian Orbis coders who’d been so cocky as to challenge him to a contest, with a bottle of fine spirits on the line - and how flabbergasted they had been when he wiped the floor with them so thoroughly, but gracious in their defeat, ending the night in a memorable communal sharing of booze and war stories from the technical frontier.

It was a wonderful story well told - but the reason it was met with awkward glances and rolled eyes was that Soren was famous in the office for two things: his weak liver, and his absolutely wretched grasp of technology. He could barely be trusted to operate a telephone without technical support. That he could write a single line of code in Orbis was unthinkable, and that he could make it through a night of drinking with Mirovians and not be sick as a dog was highly unlikely. Conversation flowed on, the group collectively deciding it was embarrassing to call the still giggling man out on his so blatantly untrue story he nonetheless told with utter sincerity.

Soona, however, had stumbled outside to deeply breath the cold briney air. She knew exactly why his story had been told so convincingly - because she had lived it. It had been on a trip to Mirovia she’d gone on  _ with _ Soren but he’d gotten ill on some street food and been holed up in his hotel room -  _ she’d  _ been the one to give up on sleep and wander the night,  _ she’d  _ been the one who went seeking programming as a sanctuary from the too-noisy world,  _ she’d  _ relished their underestimating of her and subsequent respect. 

But most importantly - she had never told Soren or any other soul. It had been a treasured memory just for her, a night that belonged to her and her alone. Examining every angle of that trip, she couldn’t find a reasonable explanation for how Soren could have possibly known what had happened in such precise detail - except for one. She had travelled back to Insulindia not long after, in the belly of an aerostatic, trying to focus on numbers and logic and not on the thoughts and sensations pulling at her mind. Soren had come back just two days later - and been back and forth many times since. It was the only explanation she could find, and therefore, the only reasonable option was to accept it. The Pale was truly memory, capable of capturing data as it flowed through in human minds, and leaking it into the receptive grey matter that was foolish enough to spend time within it.

A troubling conclusion not worth dwelling on until now, when what it implies is that when the data passed through the swallow it was not just eaten without a trace - it would have left an imprint. The information must be embedded within the matter of the Pale, in some inscrutable way. 

To think of the spread of the Pale from this point outwards is horrifying. Everyone knows that the Pale is expanding, but it is like a slowly rising tide - if you weren’t foolish enough to locate yourself directly on the coast, you had the time and warning to pack up your things and move higher. That it could seep in from  _ anywhere _ and spread in populated areas brought the existential threat to mind in an immediate and terrifying way - forcing her to truly contemplate the fact that given time, the entire isola, everyone she’s loved, everyone she knows, anyone she’s ever heard of - the aggregate of our joy and suffering - all of it would disappear into a grey mist.

Yet now, with what she knows, a part of her feels a kind of… satisfaction in this.

The world she worked so hard to build had only ever existed in the heads of thirty odd people. When the data was lost, the door was closed to anyone else ever experiencing their creation.

But now… she imagines a pale driver, laid back in their lorry, daydreaming about the world she’d helped create and which had slipped into their mind like snippets of overheard conversation.

When everything else is gone, nothing but echoes in the mist - in what sense could it even be claimed that Vaarahamira the high welkin was any less real than Soona the lead programmer? If it’s true that after death is life again then one day some kind of life might return, even after the Pale has wiped humanity away. If they could sift through the memories captured within, would the sweat and tears and ambitions held in those years still look like failure, or would it be appreciated for the endeavour itself, divorced of the outcome? 

Her work had always been her legacy. A mark on the world that could let her pass on with satisfaction that her existence had meaning. She has no plans for succession in the biological sense - long ago she’d recognized that her work would always consume her, so better to make it the sole focus of her passions than to bring a child into the world who would never receive more than the split attention of a distracted mother. When they would laughingly call their project their baby, it was with more than a hint of truth. To lose it didn’t break them because of the time or money lost on an ill-conceived venture, neither was it really the pain of sudden unemployment, or the shame of admitting failure. What was unbearable was that they had poured themselves into this phylactery so that it might last beyond their own short lives, and through this intertwining of art and technology, impact the lives of more people than any one of them could hope to reach individually. It had been a death not just of the past and present, but of the future. 

Grief had driven her for so long that she’d formed herself around it, accepted it as her core until it was hidden so deep within she could forget it was even there. But now, as she taps her fingers idly over her keyboard in contemplation (subconsciously matching the rhythm of the latest anodic dance mix her new companions are currently composing) - she feels a reluctant and unfamiliar peace. What she has discovered is objectively horrifying. An accelerator to the death of herself and all her species has made. But that discovery itself is a way for her life to have meaning - her mind may be fallible and her time in the world infinitesimal on a grand scale, but it was her mind that pulled one more fact out of the resisting grasp of the universe, and even when she is dead and gone that fact will remain.

In a once-forgotten church which is damaged but not yet broken, where ancient beams resonate rhythmically to the beat of something new and unlikely, a woman stands at a radiocomputer. 

She consults a stack of printouts and readings beside her, adjusting them into a pattern that makes sense only to her, for now. 

She opens a new file, cursor blinking on an otherwise blank screen. 

She feels herself smile - and she gets to work.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the Disco Elysium community for their support and inspiration, and to my fantastic art partner enzerr (@enzerris) for their beautiful work and ideas. Thank you to Kawa, for the proofreading and emotional support. Thank you to Darelz and Kawa for their work putting this Big Bang together!
> 
> To call out a couple direct sources - the quote Soona references is from Kierkegaard, I very directly reference a segment of Carl Sagan's famous 'Pale Blue Dot' speech, and the title comes from Plato definition of knowledge.


End file.
